Michael Coslo wrote on Tue, 26 Feb 2008 14:52:59 EST:

Klystron wrote:
Alan WA4SCA wrote:

* the aging (and death) of the ham population. The ten year license
term means that, on average, it will be five years before a dead ham is
dropped from the rolls, assuming that his heirs do not notify the FCC.

Isn't it great that Ham radio can be still pursued by older folks? I
know that that is a bit of a non sequitar, but the thought just crossed
my mind. 8^)

Please define 'older folks.' That remark seems to me to be verging
too close to that of a confrontational remark. :-(

The practice of operating a radio has never been any sort of test
of athletic ability or that of stamina or physical strength only
possible by those in the 20s and 30s age groups.

The 25th of February 2008 was the first anniversary of my passing
my first amateur radio license test. That day was close to the
51st anniversary of my passing my first commercial radiotelephone
operator's test at age 23. I was 74 on 25 Feb 07 and it was no
more difficult nor easier a year ago than it was to pass a
similar FCC test 52 years ago.

Since I've kept daily statistics pages from both www.arrl.org and
www.hamdata.org, here's some items of information of the past year
(25 February, 2007 to 2008) from Hamdata that isn't reported on
the ARRL license stats page:

No Longer Licensed [Expired] : 26,127
NEW : 27,211 (positive offset by 1,084)

Class Changes : 32,021

License numbers, total of ALL amateur radio licenses -
2 July 2003 : 737,938
25 Feb 2008 : 722,588 (deficit of 15,350)

About the only thing one can infer from those is that there IS
a small increase in newcomers versus expirees...but the total
of all licenses is still short of what it was about 4 1/2
years ago. At the present rate of license totals increase,
that deficit will not be offset for another 15 to 16 years.

The number of existing-license class changes has been larger
for this past year than previous one-year periods. That seems
to be the major outfall of the latest change in regulations for
amateur radio licenses.

In sum, I believe that the small change in licensing numbers does not
rise to the level of statistical significance.

In an overall sense, it is a little hard to come to a definitive idea of
how many are active, and most analysis only gives us rough trends.

The word ACTIVE has two meanings as used in this thread. The
'active' amateur radio licensees in the FCC use of the word
refers to the license itself; i.e., whether it is valid for
legal operation of a transmitter as required by a particular
radio service. The word 'active' as many use it elsewhere
refers to whether or not one USES a license for the purpose of
transmitting (as required by law). There are no definitive
statistics on USE insofar as an amateur radio license that
I've seen.

I think that production of stats on active Hams is very difficult,
certainly it can't be gleaned from totals.

I disagree. One of the major uses of the first major computer
systems was searching, sorting, and compiling totals of some
programmed-in sorted-for subject. That was a selling point for
the old IBM punched-card tabulator in electro-mechanical IT
operations of the 1940s. Today it is greatly aided by the mass
memories of 250 GB to 2 TB hard drives...which anyone can buy
for reasonable cost off-the-shelf at places like Fry's
Electronics. Sorting and searching programming methods have
been well-known to IT programmers for half a century.

The FCC daily and weekly database files are all available to
anyone with high-speed access capabilities. Each is so large
in size that using a dial-up connection would require about
a half day to download. ALL statistical website providers use
the SAME database so none is more 'official' than others.
What the statistics providers DO with their data is up to them.

There isn't any sampling or 'plus or minus percentage' in
regard to the FCC license class information in its database
files. It isn't a result of polling of any kind. It is data
direct from the only agency that grants amateur radio
licenses in the USA. Totals are what they are.

73, Len AF6AY